When I rebuilt my wife's computer two years ago, I installed a fresh copy of Win 7 home in a new drive, thinking to use the old drive (with windows on it) as a back-up, which I did.

Now I want to clean this disk off but windows 7 will not let me format it, probably because of the disused copy of windows that I did not delete when i swapped things around.

I have an old copy of Darik's boot and nuke from years ago which I tried to use but there is no DOS floppy in that box to receive the error file generated when DBAN did its quick analysis and found bad sectors (not reported by other diagnostic software).

Anybody got any ideas? Or just buy a new disk, they're cheap enough?

2014-07-13, 14:14

Paul T

Check in Disk Manager (Start > Run > diskmgmt) to see if the disk is listed as system or boot. If so you may not be able to remove the disk without some fiddling to move files to your main disk.
If all is OK you can boot from a Linux CD and use one of the disk management programs to format the disk.
Might also be worth running the drive manufacturer's diagnostics program to see if the disk really is flakey.